Wake County DA Lorrin Freeman Doesn’t Just Bring Death Charges Against Mentally Ill People—She Kills Reforms That Would Stop Her
New emails shed light on Freeman’s loyalty to a powerful lobbying group that “single-handedly” kills bipartisan criminal justice reform in North Carolina
Raleigh Watch has previously reported on prosecutor Lorrin Freeman’s penchant for seeking death sentences against people with severe mental illness. As capital punishment nears extinction nationwide, the Wake County District Attorney remains an outlier, repeatedly filing capital charges against some of her county’s most vulnerable people.
Now Raleigh Watch has obtained emails showing that Freeman does more than prosecute capital cases—she and her fellow prosecutors have killed reform that would protect mentally ill people from execution. In the emails, Freeman even acknowledged that prosecutors are now “the last man standing” in defense of capital punishment, yet she refused to “break ranks” with the state’s hard-line district attorneys.
In the past, Freeman has defended her prolific death penalty record in a way common among America’s deadliest prosecutors: The law is the law and I’m just enforcing it. “At this point, the death penalty continues to be the law in North Carolina,” Freeman said last year. “As I have discretion in what types of cases to seek it, we reserve it for the most egregious.”
Apparently, Freeman’s idea of the “most egregious” includes people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder whose crimes followed failed attempts to obtain mental health treatment and medication. Indeed, Freeman has shown that if she wants to kill someone who is so ill they can’t even stand trial, she’ll get a court order to forcibly medicate and “restore” competency, just so the death penalty remains an option.
But our main concern here is the first part of Freeman’s quote—that “the death penalty continues to be the law in North Carolina.” Absent is any explanation as to why it remains the law. From her statement alone, you might think that Freeman has no role in shaping the law—that she’s just a prosecutor, and that legislators in Raleigh pass laws without her input.
But that isn’t true.
In reality, prosecutors are powerful lobbyists, and according to advocates and lawmakers who spoke to Raleigh Watch, no group has more sway over criminal justice policy in North Carolina than the state’s Conference of District Attorneys. A taxpayer-funded state agency, the Conference works on behalf of prosecutors across the state, and its ten-member Executive Committee “develops policy positions” that get turned into prosecutors’ legislative agenda.
Among the committee’s members? Lorrin Freeman.
And Freeman isn’t just one of ten on the powerful Executive Committee, she’s among its most prominent public faces. “I’ve been doing this work for about 10 years . . . and in my experience, she really is very deep in the Exec Committee and their policy work,” Daniel Bowes, the director of policy and advocacy at the ACLU of North Carolina told Raleigh Watch. “Freeman is generally one of their top three or four go-to negotiators and spokespeople.”
On the whole, the Conference’s impact on criminal justice reform has been ruinous. Bowes described how prosecutors have “single-handedly killed” a host of “common sense reforms” that had bipartisan support among lawmakers. Writing last year on behalf of the North Carolina Legislative Black Caucus, Rep. Kelly Alexander said that “the Conference has failed to take seriously the urgent calls for reform in North Carolina’s justice system; instead, the Conference—on behalf of its member district attorneys—has doubled down in support of a broad range of unnecessary policies and practices that disproportionately harm people of color.”
One of the bipartisan bills that prosecutors blocked last session—and in sessions prior—would undermine Freeman’s approach to capital punishment: HB 912 would have barred capital trials for people with a “severe mental disability,” including serious mental illness. In Ohio, Republican Gov. Mike DeWine signed a similar law last year, and North Carolina already has a statute exempting people with intellectual disabilities from capital charges. HB 912 would have simply extended that protection to people with functionally similar impairments related to mental illness. Yet despite both Republican and Democratic sponsors, prosecutors “basically killed 912 in its cradle,” Bowes said. “It didn’t even get a hearing.”
Emails obtained by Raleigh Watch confirm the DAs’ role, and reveal how prosecutors ghoulishly cling to capital punishment even as they recognize that people with mental illness are among the most likely to face execution. “If I am remembering correctly, well over 85 percent of those who have committed murder and end up on death row have a diagnosed mental illness that could be characterized as ‘severe,’” wrote R. Seth Banks, the District Attorney for North Carolina’s 35th prosecutorial district. Yet instead of concluding that the death penalty is irrevocably broken, Banks said that he “personally still believe[s] in the efficacy of Capital Punishment,” and argued that prosecutors should oppose HB 912 so that death row isn’t effectively abolished by an exemption for the mentally ill.
It was on this email chain that Freeman said she will not “break ranks” with the DA Conference despite her growing reservations. “At risk of being the odd man out,” she writes, “I’ve started wondering at what point we stop being the only ones trying to keep all this alive. We haven’t had a [execution] protocol in 15 years. If the Republican leadership is now asking input on this issue . . . isn’t that a sign to their feelings on it? Do we intend to be the last man standing?”
Freeman told Raleigh Watch that she “did not oppose the Conference’s position” because “a process already exists under the law” to “consider[] an individual’s mental capacity in capital proceedings,” apparently referring to a jury’s ability to consider mental illness and other disabilities when deciding whether to impose a death sentence.
Chuck Spahos, the Conference’s legislative liaison, also weighed in on the email chain. “Thanks everyone for your feedback,” he replied. “I hope we are heading this off early enough that it’s not a big fight.”
Spahos then met with advocates in Raleigh’s Legislative Building. Multiple people present at that meeting recounted how Spahos walked in, announced that the mental health exemption was “a top priority to kill,” and then proceeded to confuse that bill with the intellectual disability exemption that already exists. “We don’t need this bill,” they recalled Spahos saying, “we already have a bill that does the same thing and it’s been working fine for over a decade, so we don’t need anything new.” Upon learning that he was vehemently fighting a bill that he did not understand, he became angry and left. “He didn’t even know what was in the bill, he was just taking instruction from the [Conference of District Attorney’s] Executive Committee,” one attendee told Raleigh watch. (Spahos did not respond to a request for comment.)
Rep. Pricey Harrison, a Democrat from Guilford, told Raleigh Watch that the Conference has consistently opposed HB 912, or some version of it, for over a decade.
“It’s been very frustrating,” Harrison said. “This reform is consistent with Supreme Court precedent on capital punishment and people with intellectual disabilities, and frankly this will improve the system and be better for taxpayers, which conservatives ought to care about.” Harrison pointed out that, “hopefully, we won’t be executing these people once courts review evidence of their mental illness, so it makes more sense to get it right from the start, and not seek death against severely mentally ill people in the first place.”
But if that happened, Lorrin Freeman’s death penalty docket might disappear, and she would be forced to follow the overwhelming majority of Americans and growing list of elected prosecutors—Democrats and Republicans alike—who believe that our most severe punishment shouldn’t be used against our most vulnerable people.